A Social Media Meetings Primer

Learning some basic concepts and spreading the workload are crucial to success

By Tyler Davidson

Get your meetings and events social media strategy working well and you’ll have engaged attendees, inspired speakers, satiated suppliers and organizational stakeholders primed for participation.

Get it wrong and your meetings story of shame may spread like wildfire on the Internet—a virtual Frankenstein’s monster that will never die.

Case-in-point: The story of the loosely moderated Twitter feed at TWTRCON that resulted in a “hashtag takeover” by PETA to protest NASA’s use of squirrel monkeys for radiation research. While attendees may have expected a presentation on customer service from NASA Public Affairs Specialist Stephanie Schierholz, what they got instead was an army of animal rights activists cyber-bashing the space agency on large projectors that flanked the stage.

And if you don’t believe it, you can read all about it here, http://therealtimereport.com/tag/peta, and probably for a long, long time.

While in reality the world of social media and its applications for the meetings and events industry is not that scary if handled with care, meeting planners should still do some basic groundwork before blasting off into cyberspace.    Read more...

THE CASE FOR... a social media moderator at your event

Don't be afraid of the big, scary Twitter wall! by Elizabeth Glau

Have you seen a Twitter wall get invaded by outside protestors or a group of attendees on the negativity bandwagon blasting a speaker while they are in the same room?

I won’t scare you with too many horror stories because in general your attendees are using social networking for good, not evil, and it is important for planners to know how attendees are using it. The next step after denial is to know when to hire outside assistance. There are many planners who are social media savvy, but one person cannot effectively coordinate the logistics of a program and at the same time monitor what attendees are saying about the event.

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